AT&T confirmed that at least 114,000 people's private data had been compromised by the iPad security breach Wednesday.

iPad owners were thrown into a panic Wednesday evening over reports that an AT&T security breach had left at least 114,000 of them exposed to hackers.

The story, first reported by Gawker, detailed an extensive data leak that exposed the email addresses of thousands of high-profile iPad owners including CEOs, military officials, journalists, and politicians.

The wealth of personal data was obtained by a notorious group of hackers called Goatse Security which has garnered attention in the past for exposing flaws in the Firefox and Safari Internet browsers as well as publicizing problems in Amazon's community ratings system.

To obtain the email addresses, Goatse Security exploited a small 'convenience' feature provided by AT&T that allowed 3G users checking their data accounts from their iPads to avoid re-typing their email addresses each time. Aiming to make life easier, the function automatically filled in a user's email address which was linked to a type of serial number called an ICC-ID -- a unique identifier used to associate a mobile device's SIM card with a specific user.

Goatse Security programmers were able to access the email addresses by guessing a large number of ICC IDs based on their own experience playing with the device and pictures posted by iPad users. When Goatse provided AT&T's site with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the website's script returned the associated email address. Goatse wrote a program to quickly automate the process, harvesting at least 114,000 email addresses before notifying AT&T of their successful hack.

AT&T says it has disabled the feature that led to the problem, and for now the damage appears to be limited to iPads' ICC-IDs and the email addresses associated with them. Just how many accounts were exposed is still unknown, since AT&T continues to investigate the incident and told Gawker Media technology blog Gizmodo there is still "no way of validating the number of addresses" that were compromised.

This is not the first time Gawker Media has been front and center in an Apple-related security breach. Gizmodo made headlines in April for running images of an unreleased iPhone 4G prototype, which it claimed had been recovered from a bar. Steve Jobslater accused the website of extortion and buying stolen property.

For now, Apple remains silent on the leak and seems to be deferring the blame to AT&T which released the following statement to Gawker:

"AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses. We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained."

The good news for users is the leak is relatively small and seems to be contained. Apple recently announced they have already sold over 2 million iPads since the device launched April 3.